Waltham engraver restores a 19th-century treasure

By Stephanie V. Siek, Globe Staff | October 29, 2006

Johnny Carrera peered under his
grandfathers favorite reading chair and
found a tattered old book. What he discovered
that summer day in 1995 changed
the course of his life: an 1898 edition of
the International Dictionary, one of the
first pictorial dictionaries printed in the
United States.

Leafing through the book, he became
engrossed by the 80 pages of engravings at
the back  the Colossus of Rhodes, exotic
animals, trains.

What a shame they were hidden away
in an out-of-print dictionary, he thought.
What if he brought them to life?

The funny thing is, when I started, I
thought it would be a fun, quick moneymaker,
said Carrera, who at the time
was enrolled at the North Bennet Street
School, Bostons arts and crafts institute.

Next weekend, The Pictorial Websters makes its offi-
cial debut at the Waltham Mills Open Studios, where Carrera
has his printmaking business, Quercus Press. Between its
leather-bound covers are more than 4,000 engravings, most
from the same blocks used to make the illustrations of the
1859, 1864, and 1890 editions of the International
Dictionary. Along with those are a sprinkling of images
Carrera carved himself.

The book is subtitled G. & C. Merriam Dictionary Engravings
of the Nineteenth Century Printed Alphabetically
As A Source for Creativity in the Human Brain, With Additional
Dissertation.

While slightly grandiose, that does indeed describe what
youll find inside.

The quick, moneymaker Carrera launched more than a
decade ago turned into an all-consuming obsession. It called not only on his skills as an
engraver, but also his talents  old
and newfound  as a philosopher,
biologist, philosopher, literary
scholar, and treasure hunter.

Caution: artist at work

At first glance, Carreras Waltham
Mills studio looks like a disaster
zone.

Every flat surface is covered by
sketches, mockups of projects,
typesetting equipment, handmade
posters, family photos, paper
stock, and smudges of ink.
The eye hardly has time to settle
on one object before being lured
away to another, perhaps the African
masks on the wall or the disembodied
bicycle parts near the
ceiling.

But look closer, and youll find
order in this chaos, such as the
thousands of pieces of metal type
 letters, symbols, and punctuation
 sorted into meticulously labeled
drawers.

Lining the partition by the entryway
are plastic shoeboxes filled
with neatly folded pages of The
Pictorial Websters. Its introduction
was set on a 1Æ-ton cast-iron
linotype machine that dominates
a corner of the studio.

Presiding over this printers
paradise is a thin, boyish man
with a shock of graying dark
brown hair.

A month ago Carrera sported a
long beard, but he ceremoniously
shaved it off after finishing the
100-copy press run.

He moves quickly, jumping up
to grab a book or shuffle through a
pile of papers in search of the perfect
object to illustrate a point.
His conversation rockets
among topics.

At one moment hes explaining
how he assembled the book; the
next hes describing the growth of
literacy in the 19th century; then
he digresses into a history of the
War of the Dictionaries between
the Merriam brothers, who had
purchased the rights to Noah
Websters dictionary, and the reference
book published by Joseph
Worcester.

Carrera cant tell you how many
hours he spent cleaning, collecting,
cataloging, and printing
each engraved image. Somewhere
along the way, it stopped being a
project and started being a lifestyle.

The amazing thing is that
somehow this book has gotten
done, he said, as two helpers folded
pages at a table behind him.

Buried treasure at Yale

Shortly after Carrera returned
to Boston with Granddads old
dictionary, a Bennet Street classmate
gave him a copy of a Globe
Magazine article about Merriam-
Webster Inc. When Carrera saw
that the main office was in Spring-
field, he decided to approach the
company about financing the
project.

Merriam-Webster thought it
was a great idea and began to
make plans for a hand-printed
edition as well as a mass-market
version that could be sold at bookstores.

But as the logistical complications
became more apparent
and Carreras vision for the project
more esoteric, Merriam-Webster
dropped out. However, the company
gave Carrera permission to
go it alone  and told him where
to find the original engravings.

They were stashed away at Yale
University  13,000 blocks locked
away in storage drawers in a dusty
corner of the Sterling Library. No
one had bothered to organize
them since Merriam-Webster donated
them 20 years before.
Carrera would spend the next
year of holidays and weekends
commuting to New Haven from
Waltham, cataloging and identifying
each one.

Initially Id go down and rent
a room at Motel 6. Then I realized
that the guards never came down
to the area of the library I was in,
and then I could just work all
night, he said with glee.

He drafted a loan agreement
with Yale and began taking them
back to his studio in batches for
printing.

Pictures with a story
Some of the engraving are so
farfetched that it appears that the
engraver had never set eyes on
what he was depicting. An illustration
of a sea lion looks like a
seal with the head of a St. Bernard.
Others are strangely evocative,
like an image of a weeping
willow that leans to one side like a
person crumpled in grief.

As the book took shape, it became
less a source of answers than
a springboard for questions. Like
a traditional dictionary, it is arranged
in alphabetical order. But
it makes no pretense of being
complete. Rather, with its whimsical
choice of subjects and curious
juxtapositions, it invites the reader
to look at the world in new
ways.

Back in the 19th century, the
lines between academic disciplines
were much more blurry. Today
no single reference work
would attempt to cross so many
boundaries.

Is it science? Is it art? Carrera
said, as he talked about the
project.

Carrera researched how printers
operated in Victorian days. He
tapped into what he learned when
he flirted with biology as a student
at Oberlin College, where he ended
up majoring in English and minoring
in environmental studies.

And he got lots of practice. He
painstakingly restored some
blocks, adjusted the height of others
by hundredths of an inch so
they would print properly. He
went through countless drafts and
ruined pages.

In the midst of this, he somehow
got married; watched a
friend and mentor, Sam Walker,
die of cancer; and had two children.

When his daughter, Ember,
now 3Æ, and son Orion, 2, were
born, he started caring for them at
least two days a week while his
wife, Carol Waldmann, a doctor,
worked. The challenge was how to
keep working without compromising
his time with the kids.

I really wouldnt say that it
took away from his ability to be active
in his family life. He could
really integrate both, said Waldmann,
who recalled Carrera working
at the press with Ember
strapped to his chest in a baby carrier.

He works nights, but he
comes home in the evening and
eats dinner, and works while the
rest of the family is asleep.

His personal Big Dig

Carrera began to make an annual
tradition of saying hed be
done in one more, maybe two
more years.

I always said I would beat the
Big Dig, said Carrera. At some
point I said, Well, if I can beat the
[decoding of ] the human genome.
. . And then they did drosophila
[the common fruit fly],
and then the human genome, and
I was like, Oh no. 

At times the work was taxing.

The enjoyment and passion of
the work is wonderful, but there
are these moments that its like,
Well, what about me? , said
Waldmann, laughing. There were
periods of time when he was stuck
on letter S or letter Y  well, Y
not so much, but when youre still
in the Cs . . .

It didnt help that Carrera liked
to experiment. After mistakenly
printing one page atop another, he
decided to dabble in double-printing.
For example, he superimposed
an image of a grivet  a
type of monkey  over a twowheeled
velocipede.

Thats what I was so excited
about from the start, how these
images fall together with each other
on the page and start to make
something new, said Carrera.

Carrera financed the effort
himself, relying on a free clinic for
his healthcare, pro-bono lawyers
to negotiate copyright and business
agreements, and finding capital
by gradually selling off everything
my parents had given me.

He doesnt know how much
hes spent. He figures $3,000 for
paper alone, and several hundred
dollars for the antique dictionaries
he uses for reference.
He tried working on the side as
a book restorer, but decided that
took too much time away from the
dictionary project.

For extra cash, he taught occasional
courses at Bowdoin College
and other schools, and he produced
two posters based on engravings
from the 19th century
dictionaries (mollusks, fishes,
ships  sea-related words figured
big in the vocabulary of the time).
In another artistic detour, he
and collaborator Martha Kearsley
created a tiny book almost entirely
out of cut-up American currency,
featuring the faces on the bills as
characters in a drama involving a
kidnapped George Washington
and the bungling rescue attempts
of his presidential successors.
Carrera doesnt expect to make
a windfall from The Pictorial
Websters.

Im hoping that with the sale
of the book I can retroactively
make $25,000 a year for the past
10 years, he said.
Last weekend, a dozen bookbinders
sewed the books together
at a party in Maine. The scene left
Carreras wife with mixed feelings.
It has become part of that fabric
of my life as well as his life, she
said. In a way Im nostalgic about
this coming to an end. But it really
is exciting, and to see the book actually
coming together  I loved
this past weekend in Maine.

And that hallway with all the
pages  to see all of them printed
perfectly . . . thats really amazing.
This weekend, the public can
see that hallway, and the books
themselves at Waltham Mills
Open Studios. Carrera will be on
hand to talk about his work and
methods.

Some 75 artists will open their
doors noon-6 p.m. Saturday and
noon-5 p.m. for Waltham Mills
Open Studios, 144 Moody St., Waltham.
Works include paintings,
sculpture, collages, ceramics,
glass-works, textiles, photography,
and jewelry. A reception will
be held Friday night. For details,
visit wmaastudios.org/os.asp.
Stephanie V. Siek can be reached
via e-mail at ssiek@globe.com .